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The Profumo affair fascinated just about every adolescent boy in the UK back in the early 60s, and I doubt that many of us forget the risqué photographs of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies that were splashed all over the place. This is a thorough and comprehensive look at the affair from all sides, and a fascinating view of the times. It makes for compelling reading.

I've been meaning to read this one for a decade. It’s described in a blurb as "A non-fiction Middlemarch of the underclass" – I don’t think I can do much better than that. Concerning a large, chaotic family in the Bronx during the 1990s, it’s an honest account of street life – from drug dealing to child-rearing. Ms LeBlanc spent ten years embedded, interviewing, living with her subjects, listening to them. An extraordinary feat of research and patience. Reading it you are realize that class is a cocoon and you have absolutely zero idea how anybody else is living. I think this book is a masterpiece.

The delightful story of the twenty-year correspondence between the author and Frank Doel, chief buyer of Marks & Co, antiquarian booksellers. I remember the sensation caused by this book. I loved it, my friends loved it, everyone did. The gentle arc of the relationship the great romantic distance between the writers. The insistence it was 'a true story' and our thrill at the power of the letter. People still wrote letters then, just. And we all marvelled at the possibilities.

Sebald, a German who lived in England, looks at the war and the persecution of minorities in a highly original and fascinating way, even including his own rather amateurish photographs and postcards in the text to devastating effect.

These letters were found after the death of Larkin’s long-time girlfriend Monica Jones in 2001, and consist of nearly two thousand letters, postcards and telegrams, from 1946 to 1984. The letters are affectionate; self deprecating and often funny. And though we don’t get Monica’s side, there are footnotes to explain some background - such as Larkin’s affair with Maeve Brennan. Larkin's love for certain writers, alcohol, music (jazz) comes across and mingles with the mundane.

Wellum was the youngest pilot to take part in the Battle of Britain - he was just 19. This book, written decades afterwards, is for me the most honest and vivid to come out of those epic weeks in the late summer of 1940. His direct writing style places you in the cockpit alongside the boy he once was.

Never mind whether or not the Mitfords are your cup of tea. This is the history of the 20th century as told through letters. Fascinating and brilliantly organised by the barely there editor, Charlotte Mosely. When this was recommended it felt like an invitation to a tour around a country house. A bit of an ordeal, albeit harmless. But it was surprisingly riveting. Yes, you meet the expected (upper-class carelessness, sniping, Hitler-loving sibling, brilliant Nancyisms) but there’s more to it than that.

I don't think I've ever read this book without my eyes tearing up. How Briggs manages to impart such feeling and generosity towards his parents in this deeply moving and heartfelt yet never overly sentimental memoir amazes me. It reminds me a little in its after-effects of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," though the two works are otherwise completely different. It will make you care more deeply about life and the people you live it with, which is about the best one can say about anything.

Andrew Wilson, author of new biography Alexander McQueen: Blood Beneath the Skin, recalls McQueen's years at Central St Martins, former occupants of the building now home to Foyles' flagship, when his MA show took the fashion world by storm and the seeds of his partnership with the legendary Isabella Blow were sown.

Smith Henderson's debut novel features a disturbed Montana father convinced that the End Times are coming. Here he relates his own terrifying experience he had as an 11-year-old at a religious summer camp that inspired the novel.